At this rate, between North Korea, Charlottesville and the climate crisis, it's unclear if America can survive being too much "greater", as the political cartoonists in PDiddie's latest weekly collection illustrate...

Be sure to click the "Layers" button on the map below and check some of the other boxes like "Cloud Imagery - East Coast". Yeesh. Or, if you live in the path of the storm, check the "Storm Surge" layer and then zoom in to where you live to see if you may be in for some serious flooding.

Thge surge areas show the inundation projections in the layers. One could check how far in surge could go. wonder how conservative these estimates are? the programming for the public behind this is phenomenal

I should have mentioned, for the Rightwingers who don't believe in warnings from those lying scamming so-called "scientists" at NOAA, it should be a great weekend to go to the beach! Have fun out there! Science is totally bullshit!

Just arrived back in Boston. Felt the earthquake in the Adirondacks. Now a wet kiss coming from Irene. You'd almost think Mother Nature was trying to get our attention or somethin'.

Back here where a TV can be turned on it's good to know that there's something else I need to be very, very, very afraid about.

2 1/2 hour ride over to the 'Nads with my brother-in-law the Tea Partier. What a non-stop conversation we had. Jeannie Dean, you woulda loved it! And I want to thank everyone here, from all persuasions, for all the homework. Felt like I was able to have a bit more of a human interaction with my brother-in-law who, as some of you here know, lives in quite a different universe from me.

This is the first time in ages that I haven't run out of milk right when bad weather is forecast (see explanation of French Toast Alert at universalhub.com), so I hit my local farmers markets for the produce that might be hit hard by the storm (especially peaches!) instead of going inside any grocery stores.

I'm listening to the governor's press conference right now, and it made me so happy to hear him say that if the forecasts are correct there could be a lot of danger and damage and then note that forecasts have been wrong in the past. How reasonable. How sadly unusual these days. This is one guy who has definitely grown in office.

Thanks for the mad love. Probably appropriate for a miscreant like me.

The thing that felt good about my conversation with my brother-in-law was how little I took his wild belief system personally. I felt like I made significant strides in not being offended by his views and opinions. And for me his beliefs are way, way out there.

By not being offended I was able to continue having conversation with him where I would at least bring up the issues of facts, accuracy, truth, reality, and the reliability or unreliablity of information sources.

I was able to see him more as a human being who believed things that I thought were wildly off the mark, rather than someone whose beliefs threatened and angered me so much that I needed to try to get him to renounce them, forcing me into a desperate and futile process of belief conversion.

It became for me more of a forensic activity trying to determine how in the world he comes to believe what he does.

Can't say that I made any kind of a dent with him, but it was really fun to be able to remain relatively calm and to be able to CALMY and REPEATEDLY object and request evidence rather than wanting to rip him a new one as I became increasingly hysterical and unnerved.

It's a powerful and weird circumstance to be in the company of someone who proudly, sincerely, and confidently believes points of view on issue after issue that you believe to be wildly off the mark.

One of the principal things we BOTH believe in is that it would be a good thing to fix our voting system. He, of course, believes in all this fraud that doesn't exist and that anyone who thinks Dems aren't engaged in hanky panky exactly like Repugs is insane but still...